Reporters Notebook: Cyclone's Trail of Misery

Nov. 19, 2007 RAKUDIA, Bangladesh

Reporters Notebook By NICHOLAS SCHIFRIN

Along the Kocha river in Bangladesh in the days after Cyclone Cidr, only the moon can stop you from seeing the stars.

I was traveling back from the southern coast on a hired boat (top speed about 2 mph) that earlier in the day took me and my team to the town to Chaltabunia, which had been ripped apart by the wind and the rain. Hundreds of lakeside villages line the riverbanks here. They do not have much, but they do have electricity, or they did. Tonight, there wasn't a single light on for 50 miles. In the dark, the villages were scenes of rebuilding and sadness.

The cyclone hit this area the hardest, not only because the force with which it traveled was equivalent to a strong category 4. It's because this is one of the poorest places on the planet. The U.N. Human Development Index ranks this country 137 out of 177. The per capita GDP is one-sixth of what it is in the United States. And it's one of the most crowded countries in the world.

Shaparjat is one of the countless poor, crowded villages we saw. Residents tried to tell me that thousands of people live there, but it felt like a one-horse town with a few hundred residents. There is a main building used as a school and there are homes tightly packed around walkways and small streams that run through the town. The residents are mostly fisherman, as are the vast majority of people in this area. The Kocha river is only about a five-minute walk. There is nowhere else to go, nothing else to see. Houses, a single building, and the fish swimming in the water. That's all these people have.

After the cyclone, they had even less. I couldn't really tell, but it seemed like many homes had been destroyed. They are or were made of tin and straw and bamboo. Sturdier than you might think, but no match for 150 mile an hour winds. The homes that had been destroyed were so quickly blown away, so completely devastated, there was no evidence of them. No foundations, no heirlooms. Just broken trees and flattened brush and mud. Everywhere there was mud.

At the front of the town, residents had buried the people who died in the storm. There were 10 graves. Each one had 5 bodies in it. Children and the elderly, I was told. Each grave was unmarked, except for small sticks in the ground.

Toward the back of the town, a small bridge had been destroyed, trees covered the walkways, and a woman lay face down in the water. She had died there sometime on Thursday night/Friday morning. Some locals told me there had been many more bodies in the same water in the last few days. But nobody had gotten around to properly burying her.

I chose a spot that seemed to have been the former site of a couple of homes for my on-camera "stand up.". Because we were in a rush, I asked our local fixer, who's been helping me report since I arrived, to conduct an interview with one of the local victims.

As I was writing a few feet away I noticed that the man being interviewed started crying. After a few questions he thanked his interviewee and hung around my computer, where a small gaggle of locals had gathered to watch me edit video and then send it along to London.

As I wrote I got to the part of my piece where I needed to translate what the man said. I asked the fixer, what did he tell you?

The man's name, I was told, was Abujapar Howladar. He was 40 years old. And he had lost two family members in the storm — his two daughters. Murium was 13. Maria was 3.